Get Everything Done

I thought this was a good post by Mark Forster, and decided to copy it here because the thread in which it appears is very long.

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/2/23/overcommitment-and-the-catch-all-list.html#comment21523812

Will:

<< Can you explain how all the catch-all processes you promoted over the years worked well? >>

That's a good question.

First of all, none of my books promotes a catch-all system. Get Everything Done proposes a short list of projects around which one circulates throughout the day. How to Make Your Dreams Come True is about not having a list at all. Do It Tomorrow is about only having one day's worth of work a day.

However after the publication of Do It Tomorrow I found that people were trying to work the DIT system without paying attention to the very strict audit procedure which I had incorporated. The result was that they were building up very long day lists which then got carried forward from day after day.

Faced with this I realised that there were two course open to me:

1) Carry on trying to teach people how to do DIT properly

2) Accept that they were not going to get the message and see if I could invent a system which could actually cope with the reality that people love their lists!

I decided that without abandoning 1) I would accept the challenge of 2). My first attempt was Autofocus (as it was then called) which is now known as AF1. I still think it's the best of the catch-all systems. I built into it a limiter called "dismissal", the aim of which was to purge the list of stuff that simply wasn't getting done. Unfortunately I found that people were very reluctant to dismiss tasks, regarding it as some sort of punishment for failure rather than as an essential part of the system. So lists tended to grow and grow with the result that AF1 became very slow.

Again I found that I had to accept people as they are rather than as how I would like them to be and carried on trying to develop a system which would correct the problems with AF1.

In the end I decided that the problem could only be solved by making it impossible to grow the list - and that could only be done by not having a list at all.

So the answer to your question is:

Get Everything Done works great provided you don't use it to take on more and more work (as the book frequently warns you)

How to Make Your Dreams Come True works great provided you don't use it to take on more and more work (as the book frequently warns you)

Do It Tomorrow works great provided you don't use it to take on more and more work (as the book frequently warns you)

Autofocus works great provided you use the dismissal procedure to prevent yourself from taking on more and more work.

No-list works great because you can't use the system to take on more and more work.
February 23, 2016 at 15:54 | Registered Commenter Mark Forster

My comment on the above:

Regarding Autofocus, the dismissal procedure occurs after the item has been on the list awhile, but it seems that there needs to be some dismissal at the front end, either before the item is entered, or shortly after. One needs to determine what is on the list in the first place, and does it belong there or somewhere else. David Allen puts processing at the beginning, while Autofocus delays toward the end.

Although I have read the Secrets book, where the no-list system is more fully describe, it is different enough from the other methods that I reluctant to rely on it.

I copied Mark Forster's post from the comments section of a blog post in which he gives a critique of the catch-all list, the main complaint being that the list grows too long, and ends with what seems to be a recommendation for the no-list. This blog post was from 2016.
The Secrets book came out in 2015, which advocated the no-list method of 5T.

However, by the year of 2017, there are a series of blog posts on the long list, and he began advocating the long list again, using the method of Simple Scanning.
I don't find the rules for Simple Scanning on TM Systems page. Here is the blog post:
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/12/2/simple-scanning-the-rules.html

Here is a tag of the Simple Scanning articles:
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/tag/simple-scanning

In 2018, Mark Forster wrote an article called Top 10 Reasons Simple Scanning is the Best of All Possible Systems
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2018/10/12/top-10-reasons-simple-scanning-is-the-best-of-all-possible-s.html#comments

However, by January, 2022, Mark Forster admitted that he was finding Simple Scanning oppressive and boring and the list was getting longer and longer.
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2787836#post2787837

There is a long discussion about this with several proposals in the comments.

Mark Forster writes:
<<You're right in saying that my aim is to have "one list to rule them all". Originally (in Do It Tomorrow days and before) I used to say "Don't put things on your list unless you actually intend to do them". With AutoFocus 1 my attitude was "put everything on the list and the list will sort them out for you". >>

And:
<<For a task to get on the list, the mind will already have done some considerable unconscious processing on it. The list is there to help the mind do the final stage - of deciding if and when to turn the tasks into actions.

If you do too much conscious pre-processing (e.g. by having more than one list, prioritizing, etc) you are not helping - you are getting in the way. The unconscious mind will do a much better job than your conscious mind.>>

By June, 2022, Mark Forster was advocating the Zero Resistance system, and here in this blog post compares it to other systems:
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2022/6/15/how-yesterdays-new-system-resistance-zero-compares-with-othe.html

Does anyone on the forum know if Mark Forster had a more recent system than Zero Resistance since 2022?